SAS Step Star James Lancashire
Here at Butterfly, we love to celebrate our team and particularly today we want to recognise the achievements and unique entrance to our team of James Lancashire - one of our newest members. Previously having worked as a senior instructor at the outdoor adventure charity ‘The Outward Bound Trust’ and latterly as a Technical Support Manager, James’ work unfortunately concluded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having spent time considering his next career move, James discovered the SAS STEP programme which would provide him with a foundation of data literacy relevant to the data consultancy profession. Through an email that was shared with James, he decided to attempt the SAS STEP learning pathway, which is “a free of charge re-skilling and employment initiative designed to equip the unemployed workforce with vital data and analytics skills needed for in-demand jobs.” (SAS).
James had the following to say about the SAS STEP programme: “Data Literacy Path was a gentle intro and recap on what I mostly knew already, but it gave everything a name or definition. The Data Analyst Path was progressive and introduced me to Data Cleansing, SQL and things I hadn't touched before. The progressive pathway videos and guided self discovery made the course easy to follow. It is easy to check progress and redo things as many times as you want. I enjoyed the novelty of earning digital badges, it gave me something tangible as a reward for progress. SAS Viya VA is a fantastic tool to enable visualisation of complex data, it's easy to use and adjust and try new things.”
Having gained valuable skills and qualifications from the SAS learning paths, James was in the perfect position to begin a new career and applied for his exciting new role at Butterfly Data. James further said that of the SAS STEP programme, he felt “it gave me credibility and a working knowledge of Data Management and Visualisation tools. Ultimately SAS digital badges gave me a signpost of ability on my CV where I had very little 'experience' of working in the field. Butterfly recognised this and, along with my management and project management experience, decided to offer me a role.” Here at Butterfly, we are always excited to find people with fresh perspectives on the work we do and James, through his time in the SAS STEP programme, showed both this unique viewpoint on data analysis and his dedication to growing in a new area.
For more on this, please see the SAS article about James’ time learning with the SAS STEP programme.
